Kaiser breaks ground on new hospital

New private bedrooms for Kaiser patients

The transformation from ballots to beds began Wednesday morning in Kearny Mesa as Kaiser Permanente broke ground on its first new hospital in 40 years.

Kaiser San Diego will build its second hospital, with a 450-bed capacity and a price tag of about $900 million, on a 19-acre Ruffin Road parcel just west of Interstate 15 that was formerly home to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters and other county offices.

Hundreds of local dignitaries and health care executives came to the property for a groundbreaking ceremony that inaugurated a 34-month construction schedule, which will end with a grand opening in early 2017.

With 528,000 local members, Kaiser is one of the region’s largest health providers. While Scripps Health, Sharp HealthCare and UC San Diego Health System all have multiple hospitals, Kaiser has always stuck with a single facility on Zion Avenue in San Diego’s Grantville neighborhood.

For decades, Kaiser has managed to grow by farming out some of its services, like cardiac procedures, to other local operators. It has even collaborated with Palomar Health in inland North County to help relieve the pressure on Zion.

But Mary Ann Barnes, executive director of Kaiser Permanente San Diego, said that growing demand for health care, pushed in part by federal health reform, has made a new hospital necessary.

“We’re preparing for all of that new growth,” Barnes said.

The new hospital will have 321 beds when it opens, with the ability to add 129 more as demand dictates. Its design will incorporate the latest trends in health care system design, from ubiquitous video conferencing to rooms that emphasize natural light and safe patient movement and medication delivery.

While there will be gardens and even a half-mile walking trail that visitors, patients and staff can use, the seven-story facility’s most-anticipated feature is sure to be its single-patient rooms.

The Zion Avenue hospital has two beds per room, an arrangement that can become cramped if patients have large families that visit frequently. The new hospital will not only have one bed per room, Barnes said, but it will also allow Kaiser to go to single-bed rooms at Zion, which will remain open.

“Today we have a census at Zion of about 400 a day. We’ll drop that down to about 200 or 250, which is what that hospital was made for in the ’70s,” Barnes said.

Kaiser asked its architect, CO Architects, to use environmentally sustainable materials throughout the building and said Wednesday that it plans to apply for gold certification under the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program operated by the U.S. Green Building Council.

In order to earn that certification, the building will use energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, low-voltage LED lighting throughout and a solar panel system on its parking garage.

While the facility is expected to use the latest in high-tech gadgets, like surgical robots and large touch screens in patients’ rooms, officials were careful to note that the decisions about exactly what kind of equipment goes into the hospital have not been made.

Kaiser project director Joe Stasney said it is important not to make decisions about technology too soon on a project that will take several years to build.

“The challenge for us is not to open up something that’s five years old,” Stasney said.

The project’s architect recently completed Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, which was hailed as one nation’s most modern and technological hospitals in the nation when it opened in August 2012.

Barnes said that facility’s design had a lot to do with what Kaiser decided to build on Ruffin Road.

“We’re trying to look at every best practice possible from a patient safety standpoint,” she said.